Been a while

It's been a while - time passes so fast lately. What a stupid statement that is time passes at a set rate however my notion of the passing of time has changed since I was made redundant in June and started running my own business fulltime. Suddenly I'm constantly working and time seems to pass me by more quickly than when I was employed and clock watching! However that is no excuse as my last blog post was in February. I do have another blog however which related to my business at www.geni-i.co.uk so i have been active in blogging in a sense.

In April a good friend of mine introduced me to a book called "Change Your Genetic Destiny" Also known as The genotype Diet. I assumed it would be a load of nonsense, but the book made sense to me in a way, it wasn't a diet aimed at losing weight but a way of looking at the food you eat and recognising whether the food is right for your body type. I followed a few pages of tests and answered medical and family history questions and eventually I discovered that I am a HUNTER!!

Grrr!

So then I was presented with 2 food lists. One a list a food that I should emphasise in my diet and the other a list of foods I should avoid.
Unfortunately for me the list of foods to avoid included most of the food I ate on a daily basis - it included all but 5 types of cheese, wheat, gluten, corn, barley, rye - so almost any kind of pastry or bread was out and Mushrooms - and I love mushrooms!

But I decded to give it a try. I immedietly started reading labels for everything... i bought free from foods at the local supermarket, became an expert on which gluten free bread tastes the best and started enjoying foods that I'd never considering eating before purely because they were on my good list and so I wanted to try them just to expand my diet!

I also had to give up tea which for me what really hard. It wasn't the caffiene - I as allowed coffee but the tea itself. So i started drinking various green teas until i discovered vanilla flavour red bush.

Almost immedietly I noticed a difference in my energy, i was more alert i felt more confident and able to face challenges. I was constantly doing something, where i had spent my recent years horizontal in front of the TV I found i couldn't sit still, i wanted to be doing something even if it was just cleaning the house.

I noticed that whenever I ate something I shouldn't It gave me bad stomach pains and I also found I was eating less, naturally as if my body was getting the right foods and didn;t need more, I was snacking less and smaller portions filled me up longer.

Over the course a couple of months I lost a stone in weight and went back down to the dress size I'd been throughout my 20s and had recently left 12 months ago for a bigger size.

In the last couple of months however the great effect has worn off. I spend plenty of time horizontal on the sofa and when I eat a bit of real bread or indulge in a pizza it doesn't make me feel bad anymore, perhaps because my body is better able to cope with it. Or perhaps that long list of foods is actually a lot shorter and i just need to test which are the actual foods that I should avoid.

Yesterday I went out to the supermarket to get some weekend supplies, it was payday weekend (which means the checque i paid myself for my wages had cleared) and I intended to do a big monthly Asda online shop (hate going shopping) so I needed a few bits to get us through the weekend. I stood in front of the free from section and looked at the bread rolls and i looked in the basket at the white bread, the bacon and sausages and thought to myself, "I'm sick of this diet" and I went home and savoured eating real bread with my bacon. It was the best thing I've tasted in months!

Having just completed my Asda online shop and spent about £40 less on food than usual as a result of not buying anything gluten free I'm pleased with my decision. Starting a business and taking a massive drop in regular income has made the last few months really hard and an over expensive diet hasn't helped. I do think however that there are people with genuine health issues that have to eat this food, does it really have to be so expensive?

So I will be monitoring myself over the coming weeks to see if going back to the old ways will cause me to gain weight. Since my birthday I've been less than strict and have not put on a single pound in those 3 weeks, so I hope that if I eat sensibly without limiting myself to a small selection of foods (because cutting out wheat and gluten is like trying avoid chemicals - everything is chemicals!) I might be able to avoid putting all that weight back on...and if I don't I'll just have to learn to love the rounder me because our lives are dominated by work and sleep and we should enjoy the free time we have as much as possible. And I love food, so to spend the rest of my life eating bread that tastes like cardboard would be a waste!